Andrew Puzder has withdrawn as President Donald Trump’s choice for labor secretary, a source close to Puzder and a senior administration official said.

The decision came as Senate Republicans told the White House he was losing support, a senior GOP source said, adding there were four firm Republican no votes and possibly up to 12.

Puzder needs at least 50 votes to pass with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence, and Republicans only hold control of 52 seats.

Puzder, the CEO of the company that owns the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast food chains, has faced fierce opposition mostly from Democrats in part related to his position on labor issues as well as the fact that he employed an undocumented housekeeper.

“No matter how you cut it, there is no worse pick for labor secretary than Andrew Puzder, and I’m encouraged my Republican colleagues are starting to agree,” the New York Democrat said. “He does not belong anywhere near the Labor Department, let alone at the head of it. Puzder’s disdain for the American worker, the very people he would be responsible for protecting, is second to none.”

THE COMPANY RUN by Andy Puzder, who President Trump has nominated for secretary of labor, ran an illegal wage-fixing scheme for managers at his company’s restaurants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in California superior court last week.

Puzder is the CEO of the vast Carl Karcher Enterprises (CKE) fast-food chain. One former and one current Carl’s Jr. shift leader allege that franchisees – which Puzder has repeatedly described as independent businesses — colluded with one another to prevent managers from moving between restaurants.

As alleged, the scheme also appears to violate federal law under the Sherman Antitrust Act, as an illegal restraint of trade. That would be a felony punishable by a $1 million fine and up to 10 years in prison for individuals charged.

The Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurant franchises headed by Andrew Puzder, President Trump’s Labor secretary nominee, are among the nation’s major employers of low-wage workers. As Puzder faces a confirmation hearing scheduled for Feb. 2, it’s proper to examine how much his industry’s employment practices cost the American taxpayer. It’s a bundle.

A 2013 study by the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley found that public assistance for front-line fast-food workers costs roughly $7 billion a year. That’s a subset of the $152.8 billion the federal government spends on support for low-wage working families, according to a separate study.

Puzder’s CKE Restaurants, which owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s brands, collects a taxpayer-funded subsidy of about $247 million a year, according to an estimate by the National Employment Law Project. That’s what it takes, NELP said, to “offset poverty wages and keep [CKE’s] low-wage front-line workers and their families from economic disaster.”

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Andy Puzder, the CEO of the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. burger chains, to be America’s next labor secretary. In doing so, Trump may be drawing more attention to the plight of low-wage workers than he could have imagined.

Puzder’s company violated minimum wage law by paying Hardee’s workers with pre-paid Visa debit cards, according to a 2014 investigation by the Labor Department obtained by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Workers incurred fees on those cards whenever they used ATMs outside of the designated network to redeem their pay.

The workers’ pay rates were so low that the fees pushed their overall pay below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, investigators found.

The agency ordered Hardee’s to pay a sum of $2,071.98 to an undisclosed number of workers based in Alabama. Records dated August 2014 indicate that Hardee’s refused to do so, on the grounds that complying with the order would require them to change their companywide payroll system.

Roberto Ramirez worked for nearly 18 years for the Carl’s Jr. burger chain in Los Angeles. He started doing food prep and eventually took on three additional jobs: cleaning, cashiering and serving. Little did he know his experience would one day land him in the national political spotlight.

On January 10, Ramirez was a star witness in a sort of shadow hearing on Capitol Hill on the business practices of one Andrew Puzder, the fast-food king who is Donald Trump’s choice for Labor Secretary. Democratic senators tried to give Ramirez and others with experience working for Puzder’s Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s chains an even bigger platform, as witnesses in the nominee’s upcoming confirmation hearing. Republicans nixed that request.